Food Film Festival gives Prague moviegoers a taste of science

The fourth Food Film Festival brought documentaries from around the world
to Prague’s National Technical Library over the weekend. Morgan Childs
visited the one-day event to find out what it had to offer.

Photo: Archive of the Food Film Festival
There are appetizing morsels to be found in each of the documentaries at
the Food Film Festival, but none of the films is strictly for gourmands. As
a part of the Life Sciences Film Festival, the event has a decidedly brainy
bent.

Festival interpreter Halka Varhaníková told me why the food series is a
natural extension of the larger festival, held at the Czech University of
Life Sciences.

"A lot of the films are fantastic. There's so much information,
scientific information, many times. Many of the films are basically
scientific. And when you see the film and you know that it's only the
students at the university that are going to see it, then you think that
it's a pity and it would be really interesting to show it to the
public. So the idea is to show some of the films that we think are the best
to the public because a lot of the information is something that people
should know.

"For example, The Empire of Red Gold is a film that talks about the
way that food travels across continents and what the implications of that
are, that we might not even know what we are eating when we eat tomato
sauce, for example, in this case. So the discussion that follows always
talks about the topics that the film opens up so people have a chance to
talk with experts in the field and discuss the questions that were raised
by the film. So that's the whole idea: food, film, and the discussion,
the debate that follows."

Festivalgoers had a chance to smell and taste the science behind the films,
with pairings intended to bring the systems and processes behind the food
to life. The organizers argue, as this year’s slogan proclaims, “The
more you know, the better you eat.” Varhaníková explains.

"If you know, for example, how a certain kind of food is
produced—for example, processed food—then you realize that it's
maybe not very good for you. So the idea behind the debates, and often
it's the idea behind the films, is that we should think about what we
eat. We should not just consume anything you can get in the supermarket
because that might not be very healthy. And it usually isn't. For
example, if you eat standard meat that you buy in a supermarket, the animal
has lived in a not very good environment.

Photo: Archive of the Food Film Festival"A couple of years ago, there was a really interesting film about meat
production from Australia, it was an Australian film crew who make a film
about people in the States who grazed the cattle in the open. One theory
says that if you want to save the planet, you have to stop eating meat,
because it's impossible to produce enough meat to then feed people.
But if you have cattle that grazes grass and you use different kinds of
animals that graze the same area, then you get excellent grass because
it's fertilized by the manure, and then you get fantastic meat with
very little bad ecological impact. So there are questions like that that if
you think more about what you buy it affects the way that food is produced,
and then it can have a very important impact on the environment."